


Her Father’s Eyes

by Paratti



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-05
Updated: 2012-02-05
Packaged: 2017-10-30 15:15:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/333120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paratti/pseuds/Paratti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I commit babyfic. Though as this is me, it’s not exactly fluffy.<br/>Spoilers: For School Reunion and the classic series and the existence of Torchwood.<br/>Timeline: Near Future.<br/>Rating: As per the show.<br/>Disclaimer: Not mine. They belong to the BBC and the Who Boys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Father’s Eyes

Mickey’s name is on the birth certificate.

It’s not like they’re together at all, not after she came home carrying another man’s child, but he loves her and it’s safest for everyone if there’s a name on the form. The Doctor and she might have made it right with Jack, papered over some of the cracks in time caused by the worst wisecracks in history, but she’s a child to consider now and it’s still safer to have Mickey Smith, motor mechanic, down as the kid’s dad than Doctor John Smith, traveller in time and space, part-time saviour of the Earth and a shedload of other planets besides and, oh, an alien occasionally on the hit-list.

If people look at her and the little blue-eyed girl with the unruly mop of loose brown curls, well, she just says that she takes after her side of the family. If no one believes her, well, it’s not the worst thing she’s ever done to Mickey - Rose knows that.

And the baby comes first.

She has to. It has to be worth it. Giving up the rush through time and space. The only monsters now have to be the ones on the late night telly when she can’t sleep for wanting, wanting everything she can’t have, everything she’s denied herself, denied all of them, If the Friday night DVD with mum isn’t exactly as terrifyingly exciting as being locked in with a mutating Dalek, it’s what she decided on, what she had to do to keep her baby safe.

Rose grew up without a father.

The last thing she ever wanted, the last thing she ever thought she’d do was to bring a child into a world with no father. The other last thing she ever wanted was to turn into her mum, wanting everything safe, everyone she loves safe.

She’s become both.

Rose doesn’t know if she’ll ever stop resenting that. She knows it was her own decision. That she told him to take her home. That she decided not to tell him she was pregnant, impossibly pregnant. She knows that he had a right to know, to know that he’s not alone, that part of his people lives on in a council flat in one of the grottier parts of London.

Rose knows she should have told him. She tells herself that she didn’t because she loved him enough to let him go, that he loved her enough to have stayed – even if confining himself to one place, one time, for long enough for their child to grow up might have killed him. She worries herself to sleep night after night telling herself that she did the best thing for all of them, that she’s the hero for leaving him.

She doesn’t sleep. She’s pretty damned sure that he knew. And that he let her.

Rose looks out for the TARDIS.

One day she knows he’ll be back. That he’ll come for her little girl, but not for her. He never told her what happened to his family, but Rose dreads one day looking up and finding her daughter gone off God knows when and where. She knows the day will come and she has to make the most of the years she’s stolen from him – that he’s given her with their child.

The only child she’s likely to have according to the old bloke Sarah Jane dragged along to deliver the baby – even if she said he was only qualified to work on sailors. She wanted to go to hospital, but hospitals might have flagged the wrong people when they did the checks. A baby born with two hearts tends to stand out where she can’t afford to – even without the tiny burst of golden light that followed her into the world.

It could have been worse. Sarah Jane drove her to a nice house in the country and it was great that the old man that owned it was so made up at the sight of the baby that he pulled strings enough to keep them both off the Torchwood radar. She had to do without visits from Shireen and her mum, and put up with lots of old blokes popping in to coo over the baby, but it was good to have company and they all brought her presents. They brought her stories too, reminders of men she didn’t know but that were her man too.

The pictures were the worse. There weren’t many, but he was there and so were they – younger and seriously badly dressed. Sarah Jane was there. Rose can deal with that – she wasn’t dumped, she chose to leave, she tells herself. What’s harder to deal with are the photos of a young blonde woman looking adoringly at a much older man in really bad clothes. Rose isn’t sure what’s worse, that he clearly has a type, or that she’s never really known his true face, if he has one.

That she might never really know the true face of her own child, if she has one.

She’s given birth to a child with the faery dust of the universe in her hearts and with eyes that are meant to see eternity. Other mothers on the estate have babies whose eyes change colour. No one else still living in the universe has a child that might change her whole body if she falls off a swing.

She’s lived through him changing and he did change. She’s not sure she can live with that from her own child.

Rose gave her daughter life, brought back an extinct race in a child’s smile. It’s her own flesh and blood that she touches as she tends her and she loves her for that as much as she loved, loves the child’s father. She can see echoes of her own long – not so long – dead father in his granddaughter. The last flower of the Timelords has Jackie Tyler’s eyebrows. Rose sees all of them in her and something unique, something uniquely her daughter, the child she smiled at after all those hours, in the eyes that looked up at her so solemnly and the little face growing into an ancient merriness that is purely herself. A herself that Rose loves from the toes she tickles to the ears she knows will need pinning.

Pinning. Maybe only in this form, the form Rose gave her, the one she knows with her eyes closed. Rose looks at her sometimes when she sleeps, tries to will the changeable anchored into the form she knows and loves, tries to keep a starchild pinned to the earth where she can be safe with the mother that loves her own flesh and blood.

Children grow and change. Every mother thinks her child is beautiful. Even if her ears stick out just a bit too much, her hair is never going to be under control and she’s started taking apart the DVD player for fun before she can walk. Rose loves her. She’ll love her even if she changes every atom of the body she gave her. Really she will.

But she can’t help fearing that one day her daughter will look her in the face and she won’t recognise her.


End file.
